Today the streets of Luanda see a mix of the elongated umbundo of the ovimbundos; Lingala — a language born to be sung — and the scratched French of the Congolese returnees. The refined Portuguese of the bourgeois. The deaf Portuguese of the Portuguese. The strange quimbundo of the last bessangana women. Together with this — in these new times — is a pinch of the elliptical Mandarin of the Chinese, a spice-market scent of the sunny Arabic of the Lebanese; and even some words of revived Hebrew, gathered at a leisurely pace on a Sunday morning in some of the most sophisticated bars of the Island. Plus English, in a variety of tones, from the English, the Americans and the South Africans. The happy Portuguese of the Brazilians. The enchanted Spanish of a Cuban who’s been left behind.

If it were a bird, Luanda would be a massive macaw, drunk on abyss and on blue. If it were a catastrophe, it would be an earthquake: ungovernable energy, shuddreing in unison the deepest foundations of the earth. If it were a woman, it would be a mulatta prostitute, with exuberant thighs, full breasts, now a little tired, dancing away naked in the middle of Carnival. If it were an illness, an aneurism.

I like “a subject of study or interest” better than “science”, because “logies” in a sense (1) also include astrology, phrenology and pyramidology. (One former colleague of mine used to say that there are real sciences, like chemistry and physics, and phony ones, which all end on “ology”.) There is a tendency (at least as far as renaming of university departments goes) to substitute well-established terms of Greek etymology with pluralised English equivalents: “earth sciences” instead of “geology”, “life sciences” instead of “biology” and so on. I can’t help thinking that, by using plurals, they try to get more funding. But what on earth is “biological sciences” if not a tautology? Does not biology sound scientific enough? Apparently not.

Since there are too many fields of study and people know only so many Greek words, it is inevitable that quite a few “logy” (1) terms are hybrid words which mix Latin and Greek parts. For example, sociology (the corresponding Greek word is κοινωνιολογία) and scientology (both contemporary and early usages of which sound tautological). Similarly, Italian, Russian and other Slavic languages have a hybrid word algologia (альгология) — phycology, a branch of botany dealing with algae. The (non-hybrid) English term algology means something else: study of pain.

Then there is philology. It does not mean “study of love” but the other way round: “love of study”. Really, it should be logophilia, and indeed such a word exists, meaning “love of words”, with a vague hint of a medical condition.

Apology and eulogy belong to the third group of “logies”. These two can be made into verbs (apologise, eulogise) — something you really cannot do with “logies” of (1) and (2) types. “Logy” (3) is very similar to -logue as in dialogue, monologue, catalogue, Decalogue…

What about analogy and homology? They don’t belong to any of these three categories. They are derived from the same Greek root logos but use another meaning of it: ratio, proportion.

Many European languages retained the Greek spelling, -logia of their -logies (see the table below). In English, logia (Greek λόγια), a plural of logion, refers to collection of sayings of Jesus, especially those which did not end up in the Gospels. In Spanish, logia (from Italian word loggia) means either lodge (as in Logia Masónica) or, er, loggia.